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When it was opened on Aug. 8, 1958, there was a traffic jam on the Gardiner Expressway — blamed on the long-winded speeches of dignitaries and their grid-inducing VIP cortèges.

Three days later, the first traffic accident on the blacktop was recorded, caused by an impaired driver. The much-maligned thoroughfare has been killing people ever since — surprisingly, two to three pedestrians died on the road between 1958 and 1968, when hitchhiking and walking on the expressway was made illegal.

In the 54 years since, no fewer than seven studies and task forces into the Gardiner have recommended demolishing or burying the damn thing.

It is not loved.

It is an open wound on the downtown cityscape, severing Toronto from the waterfront, though arguably less at fault for The Great Divide than Lake Shore Blvd.

Broadly speaking, the expressway — named for the first chair of the now-defunct Metro Council, Frederick G. Gardiner — has served its purpose as envisioned when the city was a much smaller place, vehicular traffic less congestive. It was completed on schedule and nearly on the money, at $103.5 million, just 4 per cent over budget.

Now, it’s falling apart in bits and pieces, and potentially, at some not distant date, catastrophically, as revealed by the Star’s Robyn Doolittle on Wednesday, alarming details winkled out from documents obtained through freedom of information requests. While the aqueducts built by Romans — its oldest sections more than 2,300 years old — are still functioning in places as testament to the architectural genius of its constructors, the Gardiner is limping into strained inefficiency and structural decrepitude after less than six decades.

Half a billion bucks is what city engineers have requested for The Big Fix — even as, for public consumption, authorities were reassuring us the Gardiner is safe — or at least a two-kilometre stretch east of Jarvis will be unfit for driving on within six years.

That would be money ill-spent.

A patch job on the Gardiner, even a massive structural Botox facelift, cannot avert the inevitable: The expressway is obsolete, it is an eyesore, and the gash can never be aesthetically rehabilitated, certainly not as an elevated roadway whose time has come and gone.

In another era, when the car was king (it still is, tyrannically), the Gardiner signified Toronto coming of cosmopolitan age. One can’t judge those city fathers retroactively, though even then there was widespread dismay over what was lost — including the Sunnyside Amusement Park (its carousel sent to Disneyland), parkland and residential neighbourhoods. Indeed, there was boasting at the time that the high-up roadway offered a brave new vista on city and shoreline. Of course, that vista has largely since disappeared, with the erection of plug-ugly condo buildings along the littoral of Lake Ontario, private development run amok.

Yet there is a good news lining in the bad news dispatches from the Gardiner front. Here, finally, is an opportunity to get it right, to undo the mistakes of yesteryear.

For all the mishmash of urban redevelopment, the casino trial balloons, the crush of downtown towers, the ruinous defilement of the shoreline, the unco-ordinated transformation of industrial lands, the endlessly revamped and cynically big-footed waterfront revitalization plans, Toronto has been given a lifeline opportunity here.

Think outside the boxed-in parameters of a Gardiner triaged on the cheap, which isn’t cheap at all. Think Big Dig and a decade of inconvenience out of which would emerge a waterfront of beauty and accessibility and efficiency, or at least traffic that moves more smoothly underground than what we’ve got at street grade level now.

Boston did it, albeit at an astronomical cost. Their Big Dig — rerouting Interstate 93, putting it underground through the city — has gone down in history as the most expensive highway project in the United States. The original price tag of $2.8 billion ballooned to $14.6 billion, according to state figures, though the Boston Globe reports that it will eventually cost $22 billion and won’t be paid off until 2038. The project was plagued by design flaws, corruption, substandard materials, tunnel leaks, even construction deaths — just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

Yet, for all its myriad problems and the chokehold it put on the city through 10 years of labour, the Big Dig has been an extraordinary success since basic completion in 2007. An old metropolis, held hostage by traffic jams on higgledy-piggledy streets and a causeway as obstructive as the Gardiner, has been resurrected: dynamic, flowing, unlocked, attractive.

Toronto should be challenged to do the same.

Alas, this city has forgotten how to be bold, which is why we can’t build the subway lines that everybody wants but which nobody can figure out how to finance.

Dismantling the Gardiner, ramming it underground, should be explored as a joint initiative between government and private industry, with nothing taken pre-emptively off the table, including road tolls. If nothing else, the deadline for an expressway becoming unhinged — that aforementioned six-year window — would compel the city administrators to get cracking, rather than commissioning more studies destined to collect dust.

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